Survios, a virtual reality company, announced a new round of funding led by Shasta Ventures.

Survios

Survios, a Los Angeles-based virtual-reality company, announced a $4 million cash infusion Monday to help bring its first product to market next year.

The investment round, led by California venture-capital firm Shasta Ventures, marks the latest bet on virtual reality, which aims to trick the senses and immerse users in alternate worlds.

Virtual reality has been a hot topic in Silicon Valley since Facebook agreed in March to pay $2 billion for Oculus VR, a maker of virtual-reality goggles called “Oculus Rift.”

Other virtual-reality companies have announced investments since then, including Jaunt, which makes 360-degree films designed for virtual reality, and Virtuix, maker of a virtual-reality treadmill. ANTVR, which launched on Kickstarter, has 326 backers and has raised $113,920, just over half its goal.

Survios was founded by former University of Southern California students Nathan Burba and James Iliff. Survios began as a research endeavor, code-named “Project Holodeck,” after the fictional room on Star Trek that could simulate reality.

With goggles over their faces and computers strapped to their backs, Survios users can walk around in an alternate universe, picking up objects with hand-held controllers, shooting guns and swinging axes at virtual zombies.

Survios shares roots with Oculus. Both companies grew with support from USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey worked with Burba and Iliff on Project Holodeck. The Survios prototype uses the Oculus Rift as its goggles, but the company says future models will use a different headset.

“Our core focus is going to be how all of these components come together to create a truly immersive user experience that can be applied to a lot of industries and a lot of different categories,” Iliff said in an interview. He declined to provide detail on the new product, which he said would be launched in mid- to late 2015.

Virtual reality has been a glimmer in the eye of videogame makers and technologists for decades. In the 1990s tech boom, companies rolled out virtual reality headsets intended for consumer use. Expensive, bulky and nausea-inducing, they never caught on and the industry collapsed.

Cheaper hardware, faster computers and better displays have fostered the emergence of a new breed of virtual-reality equipment, with Southern California as its epicenter.

Some in the industry worry that the attention and money flowing into virtual reality could cause more harm than good.

“It was overhyped a long time ago and it collapsed,” said Garth Smith, president and co-owner of MetaVR, which builds three-dimensional landscapes for use in virtual-reality environments. “Now you’ll probably start to see a lot of companies that say they do virtual reality. My fear is it’ll expand and collapse again and once again ruin the reputation of the market,” he said.

Venture-capital firms and companies like Facebook are betting that virtual reality becomes very real in the next five years, as the devices shrink in size and cost. With advances in wireless technology, the systems need less hardware on the head and body.

To do what today’s virtual reality companies are doing, “you would have needed a super computer that filled rooms even ten years ago,” Coneybeer said.